I Wasn't Born In East L.A.

[koganbot]

I wasn't even born in a town at the far eastern end of Los Angeles County. Neither was Tiffany Hwang (born in S.F.), but that's where she grew up, in Diamond Bar, California.

Also, despite SNSD's making my album of the year*, I've not gotten to the point with them where I've figured out who sings what, which face associates with which name, etc. I know Sunny due to Invincible Youth and Sooyoung because she danced with me at the Freaky Trigger Awards Gala and 'cause of her screaming fan girl.

So I made the same mistake Howie Mandel made, which is to think that Tiffany was a Korean speaking English very well, rather than an American speaking English with an east of East L.A. accent:

Watch on YouTube

I do think Tiffany was adopting a Korean accent right at the start of the interview when she said the phrase "audition process." But what I told Trevor was that it hadn't occurred to me that Asian Americans born and raised in North America would have any Asian sound in their English, any more than my Dad had any Yiddish or Russian in his; but seeing as how the place where Tiffany spoke English age 1 to 15 is fifty percent Asian American and twenty percent Hispanic, she's probably simply got a Diamond Bar accent (just as my Dad probably spoke a modified West Chicago accent that he managed not to make too severe), and maybe some of that sound is Mexican as well as Asian. So Tiffany's American accent differs from my American accent more than, say, Jessica's does. "Accent" is a loaded term.

I guess it's Confront The Stereotypes Week on livejournal.

*The 1st Japan Album, not The Boys.

Comments

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Also, she still been living in Korea since 2004, and having received flak about her American accent there, so she's probably worked hard to take on proper Korean affectations in her speech, which has bled over into her English.

Tiffany's vastly more comfortable talking to the camera than Jessica is.

Hah, Jessica's just lazy. It's not that she's uncomfortable with the camera, but that she just doesn't want to speak to it any more than she has to. This kind of applies to all of her idolling in general. The girl is basically a cat.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

How would you rate the accent of the rapper dude from Far East Movement? XD

Most Asian-Americans born and raised in North America have a bit of Asian in their English, as far as I'm concerned. But it's not as perceptible to people outside one's culture (I have a Russian friend whose English sounds flawlessly NYC to me, but he thinks he has a clearly perceptible accent).

[koganbot]

He/they are rapping in an accent I call "club." OK, I'm making that up. But vocalizing in song is different from speaking, and people rather easily take on singing or rapping accents that aren't how they talk. The two tracks I've played to death by Far East Movement are "Go Ape" ft. Lil Jon & Colette and "Like A G6" ft. Dev & the Cataracs, and they each have a smorgasbord of voices, Jon dominating "Ape" and Dev "G6." But on both of those the Far East Movement guys sound surprisingly East Coast to me, though they're all L.A. as far as I know. In "Go Ape" there's "Buy me a drinnnk," the extended "n" sounding very New Yawk. And "I didn't come to tawk." And "This is what we loik," that last sounding almost Cockney. In "Like A G6," though, "Gimme that crystal stoil" [for "style"]. "They be ackin' [acting] like they drunk," no "oi" in the "like" in that statement.

Here in an interview, the guy on the far right sounds basic black urban, though a mild version of it (and of course there's more than one "black urban" accent in the country), guy on the far left is very different, and I don't have an identifier for it, is lilting, you can imagine him reciting poetry, but as to its source I wouldn't know from east to west to mountain to midwest except I think there is some Asian in the lilt. From looking at them, I don't know which were the two of Korean descent, though I'm guessing that the two speakers are the two Korean Americans. My eyes and ears are truly uneducated. (OK, checking against picture captions, and I'm still not sure I'm getting who's who, since they're all in sunglasses and they're at different angles, but I think I'm only half correct; from left to right, I think, is Kevin Nishamura (the lilt, he presumably being Japanese American), Virman Coquia, Jae Chung, and James Roh (the accent I identified, probably not at all usefully, as mildly black urban).)

To sum up: I don't know. I'm not good at identifying accents.

Strangely, among people born and raised in the little college town I grew up in, some kids had a strong New England accent ("pack ya cahw" for "park your car") but the norm was standard TV American with traces of urban East Coast. I say "dawg" and "gawn" for "dog" and "gone," for instance. The two Asian Americans in my grade (one of Japanese descent, the other of Mideast) spoke the way I did. Down the road in Willimantic, though, there'd be Puerto Rican and southern black accents as well as New England and what have you.

[koganbot]

Interesting that as I watched the clip for the first time my original binary was "Asian" versus "American." But once I'd worked out that I was incorrect in identifying Tiffany as "raised in Asia," I then went to, "OK, what sort of American is she," homing in on Diamond Bar's Asian and Hispanic population. So my binary became "multiculti quasi-urban American" (Tiffany) versus "mainstream American" (Jessica), despite assuming that Jessica grew up in a city and knowing that of the two Jessica's actually been in Korea longer. And really, someone with Jessica's accent (American Standard, I'd say) could be a news reader or do "average American teen and young woman" voiceovers.

But note that (1) I was still thinking primarily of ethnic accents (recognizing that Tiffany might have picked up pronunciations from Hispanics as well as Asians); (2) the next binary I imported into the discussion was Urban versus Suburban Standard, despite my urban representative (Tiffany) being from the 'burbs and my suburban representative (Jessica) from the city; (3) I — of all people — was forgetting to think of social class, which leads to potential other groupings; (4) and I wasn't thinking of grammar and word choice, even when the actual central city urbanites of Far East Movement became a subject of discussion — and from what I could tell in that short clip, both Kev Nish and Prohgress (James Roh) speak Standard English; (5) I immediately jumped to Black versus Nonblack when Prohgress's strong urban accent showed up, though Wealthy versus Not Wealthy certainly can be part of the convo.

None of this is wrong, and when kids from the 'burbs veer urban the accent is often seen as veering black. But we do have at least a partial choice about which binaries to use; and the typical black-white binary has served to make Asian Americans invisible.

Interesting to me was how much more "urban" and "black" Prohgress sounds (leaning strong on the "n" and dropping the "g" in "ing" — which, by the way, would seem to me to be opposite of Korean, which hits the "g" really hard in its equivalent to "ing") in comparison to Kev Nish. The two went to the same high school, according to Wikip. [This is assuming I've identified who is who correctly.]

Unrelated to this — or possibly very related to this — is that, running through my mind during the SNSD interview, was the question, "Why isn't Sunny speaking? Why isn't Sunny speaking? Why isn't Sunny speaking?" I'm assuming either her accent is too strong or her English too weak. But since I've pegged her as a future President of South Korea or Secretary General of the UN, or at least as the next Oprah, she really does need a command of English to fulfill my plans for her. Not so sure how her current dazzling blonde party-girl look fits my forecast, either. Not that I dislike the style, or think that the presidency shouldn't be held by someone who appears capable of bringing out the spirits and dancing a little jig at a moment's notice, but I don't believe that the voters or the Very Serious People who anoint candidates are ready to allow the most capable person in the room to look like that. (Assuming Sunny is all that. My estimate of her is based almost entirely on her tractor etiquette and the ease with which she's learned to handle potentially obstreperous chickens.)

[askbask.livejournal.com]

Sunny making moves towards the goalposts you've set (context: pretend court where a real quarrel between two slightly troublesome boys has its seriousness taken out of it):

http://youtu.be/OBnQ8Kt6OoI?t=1m27s

[koganbot]

I decided this merited its own post.